AGENTS NEED RELEVANT EMPLOYABILITY DATA FROM UNIVERSITIES

Nobody in higher education doubts that agents are a vital channel for recruiting international students and their importance has grown significantly in recent years. It prompted me to think about the metrics we are providing agents to enable them to effectively counsel students.

A paper published by Navitas in April 2019 had the title ‘The Value of Good Advice’. The paper makes the point that in 2017 ‘almost three in four of the 624,000 international students arriving in Australia for study relied on the support of an education agent to get here.’ The title of the paper resonates because agents need better information on graduate employability if they are to fulfil the needs of those students.

There should be no doubt about the importance of this to students because recent research from bodies as diverse as ICEF, IEAA, INTO and QS shows that employability is the most important factor for international student when choosing their institution. ICEF noted that “Employability is now a top priority among international students when planning for study abroad.” It’s time for everyone advising students to get serious about how a university measures up in helping its international graduates build a career.

Importantly, that data needs to reflect on the student’s potential to get a job in their home country. For all the flag waving around post-study work options, long-term employment visas and permanent residence, over 90% of international students that study in the UK return home. As the Asian economies and businesses grow that will become an even more important factor and may well draw more UK, US, Australian and Canadian students to try their luck in the east. 

Universities are still struggling with this message and tend to rely on data about domestic students getting domestic jobs to bolster their employment reputation. In the long term this is unsustainable because the experience of graduates around the world will undermine their case. Moreover, it is of dubious morality to ignore the realities of students that have payed so handsomely to study overseas.

To give this further context it’s worth reflecting on how quickly agents have become the dominant channel for international student mobility. A 2012 OBHE study of 181 universities in seven major recruiting countries suggested that Australia had 53% of students recruited through agents. The Australian Department of Education shows that by 2017 this had risen to 71% and discussions with several UK institutions suggest they are not far behind.

Percentage of Australian student enrolments facilitated by an education agent by sector

Source: Australian Department of Education

Universities should all support the idea that agents must counsel students fairly and with good, relevant information. It follows that they need to equip agents to do their job properly and this means providing them with robust data in several areas related to graduate employability:

-         benchmarked employability data for their institutional partners by country and subject

-         Graduate Destinations by country– particularly leading employers that recruit a particular university’s graduates

-         case-studies of Asian graduates pursuing successful careers in their home country

-         data on average incomes or recent graduates and longitudinal data showing how income increase as they progress in their careers.

The urgency of this need is underpinned by recent research from QS Enrolement Solutions. Interviewing over 67,000 students from 193 countries in 2018 they found ‘career outcomes were the most important determinant of which course students chose to study’. As Davorin Vrdoljak, Vice President Operations, notes, “The single highest factor in a student choosing a course, and therefore a university and even the country, is actually around the career prospects as a consequence of doing that course.”

For UK institutions the task of finding robust data has been difficult for several reasons. HESA’s DLHE provided no comprehensive International Student data, if anything the new HESA Graduate Outcomes will be worse not better as the target international student response target has been slashed to 25%. It is also clear that Asian students are the least likely to respond to surveys and provide incomes data, so the results are unlikely to be either robust or relevant enough to provide Agents with the tools they need.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/better-ways-capture-graduate-outcomes-data-louise-nicol/

But far-sighted institution taking action to realise their global ambitions are have taken matters into their own hands to secure data on Graduate Outcomes and Career Progression. Working with Asia Careers Group for the last three years they have access to aggregated, benchmarked and average incomes. This data provides the basis for a comprehensive tool-kit for agents throughout Asia as well as a strong foundation for universities to talk persuasively and knowledgeably about why they are the right choice for a prospective student.

Louise Nicol is director of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, a company based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which provides longitudinal graduate outcomes and average salary data to both the UK, ASEAN governments and higher education institutions.

Asia Careers Group Investing in International Futures

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